[OpenSpending-discuss] Help in building criteria for evaluating open DATA sites

Mon Dec 5 09:32:20 UTC 2011

Hi Tim! Yoúr reply is excellent and was very usefull. As Public Data and data sets are in its early stages in Argentina, a Country with no Foia, we´re doing the best we can to raise the subject of the benefits of publishing data in terms of transparency and for citizen control.

We finished our investigation and rated every state from the final user point of view with five principles:
1. Level of Update content
2. Accessible format (Txt, pdf, jpg, excel, etc)
3. Internal Search: text search, parameters, dates, number of bulletin..etc
4. Presence of archive: amount of years
5. Open / Free: no registration, captchas, free of charges.

Here´s the result in a Fusion Tables and a Gspreadsheet

http://boletinesar.blogspot.com/

You´ve been very very helpful!

Angelica

________________________________
De: tim.g.davies at gmail.com [tim.g.davies at gmail.com] En nombre de Tim Davies [tim at practicalparticipation.co.uk]
Enviado el: domingo, 04 de diciembre de 2011 07:38 a.m.
Para: Peralta Ramos Momi (Gerente de Desarrollo Multimedia)
Asunto: Re: [OpenSpending-discuss] Help in building criteria for evaluating open DATA sites

Hello Angelica, (from a Random Hacks of Kindness in Oxford, UK)

Sounds like a really interesting project.

Are you looking to automate assessments, or have human's rating sites, or a mixture?

It could be useful to start an assessment from asking 'Does this provide users with all they need to use the data to do X' where X could be 'directly find the fact they wanted', or 'visualise the data in their own way', or 'support more efficient and effective work in the public sector' or 'innovate and build on top of the data'.

Each of those have slightly different criteria for what makes a good data site (or for what is important to them), and a good site should either be clear about who it is serving, or should make a reasonable attempt to serve them all.

For example:

- To directly find the fact you want - a PDF or Excel file may be better (shock horror!) than a CSV or other data dump if it provides a layout that helps a human find facts without having to fire up an analysis tool

- To visualise the data - not only the format of the data matters, but also it's structure - and that might involve looking inside a sample of datasets. Excel files with headings all over the place and non-standard coding of fields can be just as tricky to deal with as a well-structured table in a word file, for example.

- To support more efficient/effective work with the data - it might be important to have information about it's provenance alongside it, or to have contact details attached to a dataset so that you can get in touch with the data owner to talk about it more.

- To innovate and build on top of the data - good machine readable data + a clear open licence displayed alongside the datasets is likely to be important. Links to shared source code / spaces to collaborate with other users of the data / detailed documentation and APIs are all useful things too - though very few data portals provide this right now.

I've recently written a bit more about multidimensional analysis of Open Data Initiatives (rather than open data portals) recently here: http://bit.ly/uiVwCM

All the best with the initiative :)

Tim

On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 10:01 AM, Peralta Ramos Momi (Gerente de Desarrollo Multimedia) <APERALTA at lanacion.com.ar<mailto:APERALTA at lanacion.com.ar>> wrote:
Hi Open Spending gurus! (cross posting from my Nicar list) : we´re this weekend in the "Developing Latin America" hackathon ( http://desarrollandoamerica.org/  #dal ) , from 6 countries in Latin America.( I´m in Argentina).

In our project we´re evaluating sites of "Official Bulletins" in the national and state level (and leaving bases for county level) and building a semaphore map to evaluate the state of accesibility in those sites. In this bulletins, every direct ontract from public spending or public services are published every day .

We want to base our DATA rating system in parameters as: freshness, format (jpg - yes we found some!, pdf, text), accessibility, search box, advances search, etc
.
Do you have ideas or links for building criteria for evaluating open data / open Goverment sites?

Here´s a couple of this bulletin site´s deep links:

Cordoba
http://www.boletinoficialcba.gov.ar/
Buenos Aires
http://www.buenosaires.gov.ar/areas/leg_tecnica/?menu_id=675
Trelew
http://www.trelew.gov.ar/boletin.php

Thanks in advance

@momiperalta
Angelica Peralta Ramos
Multimedia Development Manager
LA NACION
Buenos Aires, Argentina
http://www.lanacion.com.ar

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